on interpreting fiction
I keep thinking about how The Memory Police is my favorite book, and I have no idea what it’s about. Potential spoilers ahead.
The blurb on the back tells you what someone thinks it’s about, but I could never understand how it connected to inhabitants of an island collectively forgeting objects and concepts.
But as someone who creates things, sometimes, I can say that I never really aim for a meaning in my work. I think something will look cool and realise afterwards that I have conveyed a feeling that I’ve been lingering on.
And at the most base level, The Memory Police gives a sad feeling. The people on the island continually lose things that had made them happy, and it escalates to things that they need to live.
And in the story, the author parallels the situation the people of the island are in to a story the main character is writing. She writes about a girl in an abusive relationship, but it’s when she realizes she’s in danger that she can no longer cry for help. Even then, when she has lost everything, she cannot find it in herself to hate him.
The Memory Police enforce the collective memory loss, arresting anyone who remembers, but are not explicitly stated to be the cause. Yet, they are the only ones the abuser could be a parallel to.
Saying the book is about being trapped, or being abused, or being in an abusive system, or anything really feels too simple, but the feelings found within the book are visceral. The main character must forget to survive, she doesn’t even know a life without it, but it’s the act of forgetting that kills her.
